It’s not exactly Currier & Ives here.

“It’s cold,” he said.

He had been outside at 6 a.m. How cold could it be at 1 p.m.?  The internet said 20.  I wore my warmest coat.  I wore a scarf, gloves, a hat, my hood, and my old Timberlake boots. You can’t get much warmer than that.  And I still couldn’t get warm.

My coat probably weighs 10 pounds, my boots five.  With every step I felt as though I were wearing ankle weights.

Surely I would warm up if I kept going.

Stopped at the Little Free Library.  There was a copy of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies.  I already have it on my e-reader.  There was my copy of D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow.  Nobody wants to read that.  There is a copy of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower.  Should I want to read that?  I know I will never read that.

My face was so cold.  It felt dry and stretched.  It’s wrecked anyway.  Bicycling long distances in the sun ruins your skin.

But, you know, who cares?  Some of the bicyclists are too drunk to notice:  they stop at all the pubs on the trail.

Keep moving, keep  moving.  I felt worse and worse.  There was nobody outside.  It was just too cold.   I saw one person with a big dog.  I hopped into the street so there would be plenty of room for the dog.  Sometimes big dogs on narrow sidewalks make me nervous.

Then I got home and coughed pathetically.  Went to bed with two boxes of Kleenex.  Can’t face Cold-eze or cold medicine yet.  Am drinking coffee instead of tea (probably a bad idea).

AND HERE’S WHAT TO READ WHEN YOU’RE SICK.  I am reading D. J. Taylor’s Bright Young People:  The Lost Generation of the Jazz Age, a brilliant nonfiction book about the London socialites of the ’20s, among them Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Michael Arlen, etc. Since I usually read fiction, I am most familiar with them as characters in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies or Michael Arlen’s collection of stories, These Charming People.

Taylor is a versatile, entertaining biographer, critic, and novelist, and makes this nonfiction book as interesting as a novel.   A few months ago I read his novel The Windsor Faction (wrote about it here and it makes my “Best of 2013” list on the sidebar)  and interviewed him (here).

I’ll  leave you with a quote from Bright Young People.

Some Bright Young People became successful writers, journalists or artists, while others plumbed the depths of drink, drugs and disappointment.  They were much written about and much misrepresented.  At an early stage their behavior acquired a generational focus, to the point where they were assumed to reflect the attitudes of thousands of people who barely knew they existed.  In the end, as the social historian Alan Jenkins noted, the words “Bright Young People” became a label for all the young in Britain who did anything unusual at all.  Given that many of the Bright Young People were artists, albeit sometimes in very minor and inconsequential ways, their spoor can be tracked across vast acreages of British cultural life.  Their style–brisk, affected, outwardly impersonal, inwardly often deeply vulnerable–influenced a host of descendants who knew noting of their ancestry, and their echoes can be found in the pages of books written long after the movement’s original members were gone.